Overview

An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky. Russian artist El Lissitzky's work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists' collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together. In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky's commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky's work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR's strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film. With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky's work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.

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9780226524238

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Reviews

"“El Lissitzky on Paper presents a significant contribution to the scholarship on Lissitzky, Constructivism, and Soviet art and architecture. Among its strengths are the book’s deep archival research and presentations—often for the first time—of material pertaining to Lissitzky’s career. Introducing reams of new material and fresh analyses, Johnson works to revise the long-held narrative on the relationship between pragmatism and utopianism in the historical avant-garde.” -- Noam Elcott, author of ""Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media"" “Johnson offers an original approach to the much-studied oeuvre of the artist El Lissitzky, considering his work in printing together with his work in architecture, rather than as separate areas of endeavor. Johnson’s careful, embedded analysis of Lissitzky’s practice throws down the gauntlet to previous scholarship that has fretted over a false division between Lissitzky’s early modernism and later ‘Stalinism.’ The result is a new understanding of the artist as both a communist and a modernist artist, effectively reframing both of those limiting terms. I believe it will become standard in the field.” -- Christina Kiaer, author of ""Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism"""

Author Information

Samuel Johnson is the Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow and assistant professor of art history at Syracuse University.  

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